12 Crazy Sailors

Water is an expansive element, but not so expansive that you don’t run across old shipmates once in a while. In California I re-met Josie, from the Virginia, and Emily (another seafaring Emily) from the North Wind. Last week I went only 20 miles out of my way to meet another old Virginian, Bill Ryall, who’s found the most ununsual boating job I’ve heard of.

At the Ruth Parker Marina in Tappahannock I found him, and the other 11 boys and girls now sailing the John Smith Shallop around the Chesapeake. They embarked in May, seven boys and five girls, in a 25-foot hand-made wooden boat carrying both sails and oars, on a three-month tour of Chesapeake Bay. They are re-creating the trip made by John Smith, the founding buccaneer of Jamestown, some 400 years ago. Smith put out from Jamestown in the summer of 1607 with seven other swashbucklers in a boat very much like the one Bill is now sailing, to survey as much of the bay and its tributaries as possible. The recreation voyage is attempting to retrace that voyage, with a few small variations, which produced the first reliable chart of the Chesapeake, a chart that guided captains around its beautiful and shoal-bedeviled waters for a century afterwards.

Ever loyal to his maniac impulse, Smith scoured the Bay to its limits. His expedition reached the fall line of every major tributary and many minor ones, including the Elk and Susquehanna rivers, far to the north, and never turned back until further passage became impossible. He mapped the locations of dozens of indian villages, and hundreds of natural formations.

The voyage itself never found much space in school history books, strange to say, but Ryall and crew may change that. The idea for this trip took shape at the same time something called The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail was coming up through Congress. This trail, authorized by Congress in December, 2006, will be a kind of national park laid out along Smith’s route—for what can you not designate a national park if you really want to?—and will essentially put parts of Chesapeake Bay under federal protection against all manner of inimical forces, such as development and overfishing. It will also provide a focus on “appreciation of the resources associated with Smith’s voyage,” and offer new opportunities for education, “heritage tourism” and recreation. Interpretive kiosks will line the route, along with “interactive buoys,” whereat boaters may drink of rich historical knowledge on local land and seascapes, and here presumably interaction means something other than collision.

Since May, they have rowed, sailed, or drifted along on the tide for at least eight hours a day, with very few days off, stopping in the evening for a fitful night’s rest wherever they could find a friendly wharf. They have covered as few as five miles and as many as forty miles a day. They have rowed through rain, thunderstorms, chilly dews and brutal heat, sunburn, fatigue, bodily indisposition and hunger, and kept smiling about it. They have passed out on beaches, marshes, docks and coastal woodlands, napped under clusters of bushes, slept the night in tents hastily put up near their boat, all the while keeping up a happy appearance and trying not to kill the people they live with and can’t possibly get away from. Their boat offers no shelter from the elements. They have clung fast to their brisk schedule. One or two of them look tired.

Not even this non-sailing Sunday can offer them much respite, but they must rotate through their shoreside stations, to answer questions for the visitors, staff the exhibition tent which accompanies them to every scheduled stop, wash each other’s clothes and prepare food. It’s a bright and prismatic day in Tappahannock, a cool relief from the head-breaking heat of the previous week. The Ruth Parker Marina occupies a wide strip of weedy sand between route 17 and the river, running from a gravel parking lot near the highway to a narrow beach at the waterside. The shallop rests about 15 feet off the beach, its nearness a testament to the usefulness of this craft: she draws less than two feet, and can go almost anywhere. Crew members slew her about as needed, push her further out in water barely up to their waists. Yet this 25 feet of hand-hewn timber is their home.

I try to think of questions Bill hasn’t heard yet, but he answers the one he usually hears before it’s asked.

“A bucket,” he says. “Just one bucket for everyone.”

“Boys and girls both?”

He nods. “Of course,” he says, in a Beatles-like inflection (he grew up near Liverpool), “we try not to drink too much coffee, too much of anything, before we get started.”